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'BioShock Infinite' Preview: Devil In The Flying City

I sat down and played a few hours of BioShock Infinite yesterday. Here are my first impressions of the game.

There is music everywhere.

This is what strikes me most about my first few minutes walking about the flying city of Columbia in Irrational Games’s upcoming BioShock Infinite.

There’s a barber shop quartet on a floating ship, some musicians playing strings, Victrolas warbling out old-timey gospel tunes, carnies calling from their stalls. Everywhere I turn, music and voices fill my ears, wafting and mingling beneath a blue sky, drifting about between the clouds.

“We have such a limited pipeline with games,” lead designer Ken Levine tells me when I ask him why they made music such a big part of the game.

Unlike real life and its wide array of sensory inputs, in a video game there’s basically only visuals and sound, and Levine and the BioShock team have made the most of them both. Music, chatter, the sounds of the city, the sharp pop of gunfire, all of it adds punctuation to the sights and splendor of the city.

The White City

At least part of the inspiration for Infinite Levine took from the book The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson’s narrative account of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

Also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition (as it marked the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World) the fair was one of the most remarkable World’s Fairs of all time. Architects crafted massive, stucco-white buildings designed to stand only for the duration of the fair—buildings on a scale that dwarfs imagination.

The 14 buildings constructed for the fair added up to a total of 63 million square feet, and stood on 633 acres.

These grand, neoclassical buildings at once symbolized the emerging concept of American Exceptionalism and served to draw visitors to view new wonders from across the world.

These included the very first Ferris Wheel, pictured above—a massive contraption standing 264 feet in the air capable of sitting over 2,000 people at a time. It was designed to rival the Paris World’s Fair’s Eiffel Tower.

The Columbian Exposition also marked the dawn of a new technological era, introducing the alternating current lightbulb developed by Westinghouse, and showing visitors myriad other innovations and marvels.

The event was designed to inspire awe and to cement Chicago in the world’s mind as a great American metropolis, rivaling even New York City.

In the flying city of Columbia, we witness similarly daunting structures. Grand, floating neoclassical edifices not merely massive, but perched high among the clouds.

Levine tells me that he wanted to create that same sense of wonder in Columbia that people must have felt at the Chicago World Fair. A newness and a technology more like magic than science.

And like the White City in Larson’s book, there is a dark underbelly hiding just beneath the gilded surface.

The Shining City on a Cloud

I knew going in that Infinite delved into themes of American Exceptionalism, a concept that emerged in earnest around the time the Columbian Exposition but hearkened back to the idea of the City on a Hill—that Utopian vision of the United States first envisaged by the Puritans who believed they could remake the world in a more godly image.

This notion has been revived and updated throughout America’s history. President Reagan outlined his own vision for a “shining city on a hill” when he left office. You can hear its less poetic resonance in chants of “We’re number one!” at political events, or in politicians’ crowd-pleasing speeches proclaiming ours a nation of destiny, the greatest nation of all time.

Manifest Destiny fueled our expansion across the continent, and fuels Columbia’s ascension into the clouds.

For the citizens of Columbia, American Exceptionalism died with the Civil War and the “traitor” Lincoln.

Following their prophet, Zachary Comstock, the Columbians proudly seceded from the Union and took to the skies. And like the Puritans before them, their secession was not merely born out of politics, but out of religious fervor.

This surprised me—I wasn’t expecting such strident religiosity from the game.

The archipelago of grand buildings and manicured promenades is, on the surface, the very picture of the Good Ol’ Days.

Men in straw hats sitting idly with pretty women in turn of the century dresses and sunhats; children playing the streets; vendors selling hot dogs and people strolling about listening to music or visiting the carnival. It’s like a never-ending World’s Fair.

The hooded worshipers in their watery, candlelit temples is an odd, but fitting, juxtaposition of both imagery and theme. There’s that sense of old time religion and old time Americanism wound closely together. It’s also deeply creepy.

Columbia’s smiling facade is underpinned by a religious cult devoted to the teachings of Comstock and ruled by his most zealous adherents. It is, in the greatest of American traditions, an offshoot of Christianity that has taken on its own distinctly American sentiments and mythology.

Both Andrew Ryan, the Ayn Rand-inspired objectivist villain from the first BioShock, and Zachary Comstock share one thing in common: an obsession with power. While Ryan was an atheist and a strident capitalist in the vein of John Galt, Comstock is a religious figure and an ultra-nationalist.

Yet both men are drawn to the same conclusions, toward a totalitarian vision of the world with their own booted feet at the top of the pile.

The city of Columbia is a living, breathing creature. The buildings don’t merely float, they shift in the air. The city has a pulse, a rhythm that makes it feel alive, awake somehow—if not sentient, then at least organic. It is the product of a melding of technology and magic, and it makes for a glorious environment in which to play a game.

But not all is light and airy. Enter certain buildings and you’ll find corpses half-eaten by crows. Pictures of Abraham Lincoln painted as the devil hang from the walls. Segregation is strictly enforced—in Columbia, there is no recognition of emancipation—and we are constantly told that it is the White Race’s duty to dominate all others.

Columbia, it turns out, is not merely a bastion of American Exceptionalism, it is a religious cult and a white nationalist society that delights in the subjugation of black people, Native Americans, the Chinese.

There’s a scene taken straight out of The Lottery, the short story by Shirley Jackson, and in many respects Columbia is very much like the small town in Jackson’s work—an idyllic setting on the surface, but all its serenity enforced through violence.

Devil in the Flying City

Infinite’s protagonist, ex-Pinkerton Booker DeWitt, is the grudging hero of the story, sent to Columbia by mysterious benefactors who have hired to him to find “the girl” and bring her safely to New York in order to “wipe away the debt.”

It’s all very cryptic, but the people who have sent DeWitt come across as just as wicked as the people he finds himself confronting in Columbia.

Unlike past BioShock games, Booker is not a silent protagonist. He’s not a cipher in the vein of Gordon Freeman, though like Half-Life 2 he doesn’t traverse the game alone.

Infinite’s version of Alyx Vance is Elizabeth, a young woman who has been locked away in a tower her entire life and who possesses her own suite of strange powers.

Elizabeth, pictured above, reminds me more than anything of Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

This is at least partly intentional. Levine tells me Elizabeth’s character is meant to be viewed as something of a nerd. She’s spent her whole life studying cryptography and whatever other dorky stuff she could get her hands on while ensconced in captivity. She’s like the archetypal princess locked away in a tower, and DeWitt is her knight in shining armor.

So part Belle, part Rapunzel, and part Alyx Vance—at least so far as I can tell.

Like DeWitt himself, Elizabeth is larger than life. Her character is distinct, pronounced, her eyes larger and her face more cartoonish than any of the other NPCs. This was done partly in order to convey her emotions from a distance, Levine tells me, and partly because she is supposed to be viewed as distinct and special.

Fortunately, at least in the part of the game I played, Elizabeth is not the cleavage-sporting figure we’ve seen in some early screenshots. As you can see in the picture above, she’s dressed modestly enough and has more reasonable dimensions. Unless she dons a more revealing outfit in the game and goes in for some plastic surgery, I think this is a step in the right direction.

As players blast their way through the game—for all its interesting themes, this is still very much a violent first-person shooter—Elizabeth and Booker get to know one another through dialogue and choices and their relationship evolves over time. Apparently it can evolve in different ways as the game progresses, though my time with both characters was much too brief to say.

Both Booker and Elizabeth have special roles to fulfill in Comstock’s prophecy. Elizabeth is a Chosen One of sorts, destined to bring about some sort of final verdict to the “Sodom below.” Booker, meanwhile, bears the Mark of the Beast and is labeled the False Shepherd, a devil in human skin, by his antagonists.

Combat and Gameplay

Certainly you gain devilish powers as you make your way through the game. Various Possessions grant you the ability to levitate enemies or swarm them with a deadly, flesh-eating murder of crows, or lob fire grenades at your foes burning them to death.

These super powers work in tandem with a suite of guns that, while distinctly “old-fashioned” manage to be quite deadly. Everything from rocket launchers to sniper rifles are present, though you can only carry two guns at a time, and ammo runs out quickly the more powerful the weapon (though you can upgrade clip size, accuracy, damage, etc. at vending machines using the Silver Eagle currency in the game.)

This is where Elizabeth becomes more than just a chatty companion. She’ll toss Booker ammo refills or health kits, pick locks on chests or doors, and generally assist him in his efforts to escape the city. She’s not a fighter herself, but she does have her own strange powers that weren’t fully explained during my several hours with the game.

Thankfully, this isn’t merely a relationship between the archetypal Tough Guy and the archetypal Damsel in Distress, at least so far as I can tell. Again, my experience is too limited to speak at length about these characters and the dynamic between them.

Combat is generally satisfying. There are a range of difficulty levels to choose from, and a number of ways to approach each combat situation.

One possession power, for instance, gives you control over machines. So, for instance, you can turn a turret gun against your enemies. Or you could blow up the turret and shoot down your foes, or burn them to death, or toss them into the air and pick them off while they’re helpless.

The guns have a weight to them that’s familiar to earlier BioShock titles. The gunfire pops satisfyingly. You can feel the gunshot and see its impact on your opponent. In melee-centric games, one thing I always look for is the “oomph” factor. Does combat create a visceral sense of contact? The same “oomph” factor can be applied to shooters, and Infinite certainly does a very good job at it.

Melee is an option that I actually used quite a bit as well. Enemies rush you, and swinging at them with your hook-arm can be an effective way to not die.

That same arm allows you to swing from hooks throughout the city, or ride its rail system which is, in its own right, a thrilling activity. Zipping along through the clouds between floating buildings is actually quite a lot of fun, especially when it’s integrated directly into combat.

Final First Impressions

It’s much too early to say whether this game will be great or not, but I had a really good time playing it so far, and I’m actually quite saddened by the fact that I won’t be able to play it more until March 26th (or, one hopes, slightly before its release so that I can give it a full review.)

I’ve said before that one of the most important considerations I take into account when reviewing a game is whether I feel like finishing it or not. I feel like finishing, or at least continuing to play, BioShock Infinite.

Speaking of March 26th, the game was delayed after Rod Fergusson came onboard from Epic and decided that the game needed an extra month of polish and bug-fixes before its release. Levine agreed. Better to delay the game and make it as good as it possibly could be than to release a half-baked product.

I asked Levine if all the delays and personnel changes pointed to some sort of bigger struggle with the game’s development. He told me that wasn’t the case.

Basically, he said, the long development cycle boils down to the game growing much bigger than anyone expected. The well-received E3 demo caused everyone to rethink just how much they wanted to deliver, and the team realized they wanted to shoot higher rather than over-promise and under-deliver even if it took longer to ship. Publisher 2K was supportive, according to Levine.

“I knew there’d be speculation,” Levine tells me, “But I’m not interested in fighting PR wars. I’d rather just show you the game.”

That makes sense to me. The game itself is a lot of fun.

It’s not open-ended in the same way that a game like Dishonored is, though the way the city of Columbia functions as its own character within the game world reminds me a bit of Dunwall. This is not an open-world game, though it is a game with choices, optional quests, and lots of secrets and lore to riddle out, making the game a lot more interesting than many other shooters out there.

In my review of Far Cry 3 I noted that it had a hard time balancing out narrative pacing with its open-world approach. Infinite pays much closer attention to its story and pacing, on the other hand, and I think that’s a good thing. Not every game needs to be open world, or played at your own pace.

But this is hardly just a corridor shooter, however.

I spent lots of time exploring right off the bat. Exploration is an important feature in the game, as the game world itself is really fun to explore.

Exploring helps you learn about the city’s history and its mysterious leader and the strange powers and technologies that sustain everything and everyone. It can reveal interesting tidbits about the game world.

Eavesdropping gives you a sense of the people who inhabit it, and spending any time looking at posters or listening to people reveals just how prevalent the Prophet’s propaganda is.

You also find better gear uprades and special powers if you go off the beaten path.

Still, you never go off that path for too long. The story pounds away and the pacing, at least in the first few hours of the game, is strong. There’s a good balance between these elements, though I have no idea if that balance persists throughout the game.

Perhaps my only real complaint so far in the game is the checkpoint system.

When you die, you’re revived near where you bit the bullet, but none of the enemies you just killed revive with you. So let’s say you’re up against seven enemies and you kill off four before dying. When you come back to life, only three remain. This means that no matter how much you die, you can always complete an area through sheer perseverance alone.

I think this is a mistake. It allows players to fail repeatedly rather than forcing them to learn. If there were one thing I’d change about the game after just its first handful of hours, it would be this.

While I’m sure in my full review I’ll have more gripes—I always do, since even very good games have their issues—for the purposes of this preview one needs to acknowledge that the game is still not a finished product and cannot be properly judged until it’s ready to ship.

I will say that I think rumors of the game’s troubles are almost certainly overblown.

What I’ve played so far is solid and fun and sports some of the best-looking environments I’ve ever seen in a game. The floating city provides a depth and scale that is truly unique, and the juxtaposition of this gilded veneer and the fanatical darkness beneath it gives the game real menace, even if it’s a very different sort of menace than we felt in the cramped underwater halls of the first BioShock games.

Gone is the tense claustrophobia of Rapture; Columbia is a city of seemingly infinite space.

Disclosure: I spent my own money to travel to Los Angeles to attend this preview event, though food and drinks were provided on-site.

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>Disclosure: I spent my own money to travel to Los Angeles to attend this preview event, though food and drinks were provided on-site.

I truthfully appreciate this, because this shows your integrity as a journalist.

What it sounds like from here is good, I just hope the difference is gameplay is sharp enough that the game doesn’t feel as clunky as the old games did, which is the reason I stopped playing them after getting annoyed.

Thanks, John. From what I’ve played it’s very good, and not clunky. They’ve done some polishing work for sure, though it certainly still feels like BioShock. Then again, you may find it clunkier than I do. Hard to say.

I agree that the first Bioshock was clunky, but the gameplay was much more fluid in the sequel (one of the only areas where it improved upon the original). Hopefully this means they’ll have solved the clunkiness issue in the new game.

The juxtaposition of american exceptionalism and religion is very fitting. American exceptionalism is almost like a religion itself; those who embrace it hold a deluded, dogmatic view of reality, and when they make those views part of their self-concept, they react with hostility to those with conflicting views. This, along with white supremacy, sounds like an interesting theme. God damn, I want this game. What I really want, however, is this game, along with the original Bioshock. With that, my PS3′s Bioshock collection will be complete.

“though you can only carry two guns at a time”

What the hell am I reading? Since you’re on the topic of moving in certain directions, this is not the right one. Goodbye flexibility, hello arbitrary limits. (Powered by Halo, mountain dew, etc.) I then expected you to mention this game’s health regen and hiding behind waist high cover mechanics. (Powered by you know who.)

Nice! Another Kain article, and this time with one of my most anticipated games. I have to ask real quick: When you say it’s not open world, was it still backtrackable and is the exploration along the lines of the first Bioshock?

I have not properly played the first two bioshock games, (literaly just had a go with a friend) but the checkpoint system you describe sounds exactly the same as the system from the last two games, so its not a new feature, though I imagine its perturbing to people not used to the game, why change it if people seemed to be ok with it before

> Fortunately, at least in the part of the game I played, Elizabeth is not the cleavage-sporting figure we’ve seen in some early screenshots.

Could you explain please how and in what way this is fortunate? What would it have changed about the game if Ken Levine went with his original concept for the character? Would it somehow have changed the personality of the character or possibly made the writing and characterization worse than it is? Why does someone like him need to explain himself in front of the feminist inquisition? http://goo.gl/qaMKQ

And how is it good that after months of constant pestering they yielded to a very loud minority, before they even got to experience the game at that? http://i.imgur.com/HZ9Uw.jpg

I doubt this will be meaningfully calming to you, and this will all somehow still be the fault of feminism, but I think Levine has hinted that players will also see the original Elizabeth, through as-yet-undisclosed means probably involving portals.

Great preview Erik! This is one of the games I’m definitely looking forward to playing this in 2013. I still remember how blown away I was when I first played the first BioShock game. The gameplay, atmosphere and the characters were amazing! BioShock Infinite looks and sounds like a winner.

I was expecting this game would be good, glad to hear positive previews from you and others.

Also, thanks for bringing up Elizabeth. I’ve seen that new screenshot posted on other sites without comment and to me that’s just ridiculous. Controversy or no, she’s clearly been redesigned and that seems like it’s worth a comment in passing if nothing else.

Regarding the controversy, I dislike it. I never had a problem with her old outfit, I don’t have a problem with her new outfit either. Honestly, I prefer her old hairstyle but that’s me, I’ve always liked longer hair on women.

Overall, just looking forward to getting this game and I don’t mind the delay, more studios should be willing to delay if it means a better game. Especially with an IP like Bioshock, it’s not some new IP no one has ever heard of or an IP with a checkered past, it’s a series with a solid reputation. I make a point of this because I honestly feel Mass Effect 3 probably should have been delayed to flesh out the ending and properly inlcude Javik, but that ship has sailed.

Oh, I have to say I disagree with you on the difficulty (and that this site needs a way to edit comments!). The current method sounds fine by me as I primarily play games to relax. Some challenge is good but I would appreciate the checkpoint system you described. They can throw in achievements and the like to encourage you to play smarter. Also, they could create some kind of hardcore mode or harder difficulty level where the checkpoint system is different. What you describe sounds exactly like how Bioshock worked, if memory serves, and that game was fine as is. Thanks!

That was a good preview. Bioshock Infinite sounds promising; I’m still a bit on the fence though. I loved the first one, but the second was pretty underwhelming. So I highly doubt I’ll break my game-buying rule and pick Bioshock up on release day, but I already put it in my Blockbuster @Home queue. I actually got my game-buying rule from one of my coworkers at DISH. He suggested that I rent all my games first, then if I’m not already done with it, and I like it. THEN I buy it. So I’ve been getting all my games through DISH’s Blockbuster @Home for the last 8 months or so, and it’s saved me a ton of money on games I would have normally bought and barely played. Plus since it’s a pay-by-the-month service, my bill is always the same, no matter how many games I burn through in the month!